Keep Shopify collections sorted on a schedule

Scheduled sorting applies your sorting strategies on your store schedule, so your Shopify collections stay in order as products change. You need at least one strategy set to Enabled that holds collections. A sort frequency is always set, your plan’s default until you change it.

Turning it on

1. On Home, the Sort frequency row reads out the cadence you are on, for example “Every day at 3:00 AM”, with the next sort under it. Press the row to change it.
2. Open a strategy and set Sorting to Enabled. Every collection that strategy holds then sorts on your store schedule. Leave a strategy on Manual only to keep it for hand-run sorts.

The schedule is one setting for the whole store. Strategies decide who runs on it, not how often.

Choosing a frequency

The frequency editor offers three buckets:

• Hourly: every 1, 3, 6, or 12 hours.
• Daily: every day or every 2 days, at a time you choose.
• Weekly: on a weekday you choose, at a time you choose.

Daily and Weekly are included on every plan. Hourly is on the Max plan. A bucket your plan does not include stays visible, showing the plan that unlocks it, and Home names what an upgrade would give you.

If you move to a smaller plan while a faster schedule is saved, Siftori keeps your schedule and simply runs it at the pace your plan includes, with a banner saying so.

How many collections sort on a schedule

A strategy ranks a collection when it decides the order. Only a strategy that does nothing but keep the arrangement you made by hand does not rank. Your plan sets how many collections an Enabled strategy may rank: 3 on Free, 50 on Pro, unlimited on Max.

Only ranked collections count. Manual only strategies are not counted, and neither is sold-out handling, which is a store setting rather than a strategy and is free on every plan.

Over the limit, every collection an Enabled strategy ranks stops being ranked, and a banner explains it. They keep the order they were last given, so your storefront does not change, and their sold-out handling keeps running. The collections that never counted carry on as normal. To start ranking again, set a strategy to Manual only, give it fewer collections, or move to a bigger plan.

When do scheduled sorts run?

A due sort starts within about five minutes of its slot. In detail:

• Daily and weekly schedules run at the time you set, in your store’s timezone. Siftori reads that timezone from your Shopify settings and shows you which one it is using. Change it in Shopify and Siftori picks it up at its next full update from Shopify, which runs nightly. Pressing Update from Shopify on the Collections screen does it sooner.
• Daylight saving is handled for you. Your sort keeps the time you set across the change.
• Hourly is an interval rather than a time of day, so it has no clock setting: every 6 hours runs around 00:00, 06:00, 12:00, and 18:00 UTC.
• If your schedule was set up a long time ago, open Sort frequency and save it once. That moves it onto your store’s own time.
• Before every sort, Siftori refreshes product data from Shopify, so the sort uses current inventory and prices.
• Sorts run on the schedule, with two exceptions. On Pro and Max, a collection that sorts on your schedule is also sorted within minutes of editing the collection in Shopify. Free waits for its next scheduled sort. The other is the sold-out check, which moves newly sold-out products down without putting the rest of the collection back in order. Nothing else triggers a sort of its own, so use Apply Sort to react right away.
• A scheduled sort replaces whatever order the collection has, including one you brought back from the sort history. The restore dialog warns you when that will happen and points at the strategy to set to Manual only if you want the restored order to hold.
• A collection Shopify sorts itself is skipped, and its row says so.

Sorting a collection by hand

Apply Sort on a collection page sorts that collection immediately, after showing you a preview. It works on every plan, and on a Manual only strategy. It is never limited by your plan.

Most collections finish in seconds. A very large one can take a few minutes, and the app tells you when a sort is taking a while.